Explosives Detection – Do New Technologies and New Approaches Signal a New Market?

Check out our latest research on this topic: Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Market – 2014-2022

For the last decade, explosives detection technologies and practices appeared to have been frozen in time. Companies continued to bring to market the same decades old technologies – with improvements, with better performance, but with essentially the same technical, technological and cost-effectiveness outlook.

But despite the dormant appearance of this sector, it appears that a lot of work is being done in the background to change the essential characteristics of the offerings, using new technologies, new approaches to deployment and usage and new thinking about expanding markets.

New technologies, such as Low Cost MOS-Based Electro-Chemical Sensor Networks, Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometry, Pulsed Laser Photodissociation/Laser Induced Fluorescence (PSP/LIF) and Mechanically Scanned MM Wave Imaging, are beginning to challenge the conventional approaches to explosives detection.

New companies, such as Qylur Security Systems Inc. in California are doing some very interesting work, challenging the traditional engineering, philosophy and cost-effectiveness mathematics of the explosives detection sector.

All these activities hold promise for much needed change in the explosives detection, a change that will open the market to possible expansion beyond aviation, high security assets and military operations (including force protection).

It is also important to keep in mind another, further away, horizon, around 2020, when we expect the explosives detection market to take another leap forward, away from dedicated systems and toward open-space screening.